On seeing Rituparna Ghosh’s Chitrangada

(this was written at least two years ago after seeing the film)

The film was a revelation. I did not see it in 2012, when it was released. Somehow I had thought that it would be a replay of the Ar Ekti Premer Golpo themes.

But, no. The film is like a haunting lyric. Playing out the power of Rabindranath Tagore’s  lyric ‘amar praner pore chole gelo ke/ basanter batashtukur moto/ se je chunye gelo, nuye gelo re/phul phutiye gelo shoto shoto…’

A translation of these lines reads (and this song is not in the film):

Who is that who just passed over my being?/ like the breeze in Spring?/ that being touched me, overwhelmed me/ and made so many flowers spring in his/her wake…’ 

The film is like that. Echoes and reechoes. Not a word, not a gesture out  of place. Perfectly orchestrated; a lyric on the pain of otherness. So one of the songs that run through the film, which actually one has to slightly strain to hear, is Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘ bodo bedonar y moto bejechho tumi he’ or ‘Oh, you have sung through my being a sad song, always’.

Who is the one addressed? Is it God, or Nature, or who? Who has the answer to the secret of being? The film does not answer. But only poses the questions. And portrays the suffering of the one who is different. How he/she tries to belong. So Rudra Chatterjee, creative dancer and producer of Rabindranath Tagore’s Chitrangada (the masculine warrior princess who wished to become a beautiful woman), wishes to become a woman, because his body feels like one. He repeatedly goes through the pain of multiple surgeries, including breast implantations, to look attractive and desirable for his male lover. The story is Rituporno Ghosh’s own life. Self-reflexivity as Art; Art and Life inevitably inhere in each other.

Echoes of Philadelphia. Sexuality that is not accommodated by society. And certainly not middle class Bengali society. The pain and bewilderment of parents who find it hard to accept a child that society rejects, especially on the grounds of sexuality. Themes of the stranger abound in literature. Themes of transformation too.

Transformation is the stuff of fairy tales. Beauty and the Beast. The Frog Prince. The moral lesson that underscores the need for transformation and the uphill moral climb to re-transformation.

In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, little, black girl, Pecola Breedlove, yearns for a pair of ‘blue eyes’ that she thinks will take care of her socially outcast state. It will make the man in the candy store give her candy with more respect, instead of throwing it at her.

The film is a signature of how much Rituporno Ghosh suffered. Perhaps it was (it was) his last film. An unforgettable farewell gesture.

 Each actor, playing a major role or side one, is in tune with the whole. Superlative performances given by Rituporno himself, Jishu Sengupta, AND Anjan Dutta. I loved him the best. Restrained, disengaged initially, but more and more engaged as the sessions and story telling progresses, a model of the perfectly trained emotionally intelligent person. What a performance! Dipankar Dey, the actress who played the mother, were  all so very good. The subdued pain of the parents. However, the need to hold on in spite of everything.

 The loyal household person. When all abandoned Lear, his Fool came along with him on the heath. And the socially outcast son still has meals with his parents. That says something. Having meals together is commonality and community. That is the first thing that Macbeth loses—he cannot eat with his peers after the murder.

Coming back to Subho, or the counselor.  The reality of the counselor itself becomes problematic at the end. It seems there was no counselor. Just a voice? The Atman speaking and counseling? Reaching out to the rent apart, ‘unaccommodated’ (King Lear) self? The Self healing the Self?

Who knows? There are no answers. Except the reality of transits at all points.

Pain insufferable. But caught within artistic design and story telling.

The dirty, mleccha outsider that a sanitized, obsessively clean and hetero normative society, wishes to expunge? The film wrings one’s heart at so many levels.